


Sleepless

by twofoldAxiom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Atypical Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Black-Red Vacillation, Depersonalization, Depression, F/M, Hypomania, Insomnia, Light BDSM, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido, Minor Sollux Captor/Karkat Vantas, More tags to be added, Pale Bondage, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Quadrant Vacillation, Racing thoughts, The Saddest Masturbation Scene, Weird Brain Shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-10 14:05:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3293117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofoldAxiom/pseuds/twofoldAxiom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A peek into insomnia, quadrant clusterfucks, psychiatric disorders, and Sollux Captor's relationship with such.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waking

You literally don’t know why you’ve woken up. You stare at the ceiling in a daze, checking your bodily functions like running diagnostics on your husktop, parsing through memories.

No daymares, not today, and you’re lying still enough that you would know if you were dreaming. You’re still breathing normally. In. Out. In. Out. It’s even and soft, and you can hear it, so that’s not it. You don’t need to use the gaper. You’re not horny. Nothing but the soft buzz in your head, like the bees, except the bees are asleep and don’t sound like a subsonic thrum in your skull.

Static more like, then. It’s like your head is full of static. Your medication had been taking care of that for a few months now, or at least it should have been. But you’re waking up again when you shouldn’t be and that’s going to fuck with your productivity if you don’t find some way to mitigate it.

You slide out of the slime partway. The world is quiet and soft, slightly flat, blurry around the edges, except for the low hum of your thoughts. You remember you don’t sleep with your glasses on, which explains the blur. The buzz resolves itself out of the slime into snippets of memory, music, conversation, rhythm. Background noise but too invasive to just be background. You crinkle your nose. The actual static around your horns pops in your ears.

You slide out of the slime completely and sit against the side of the cupe. You don’t feel like moving yet. Or you do, but it doesn’t feel like you can will yourself to, not any faster than you currently move. You may as well still be swimming in the sopor.

Food, you think. And water. You’re notoriously bad at remembering those things, remembering to take care of the meatsack you call a body. If you don’t need to take a piss or take a dump, maybe you forgot to deal with that. You can’t really remember if you have this time. You don’t feel hungry. You feel slightly dry, and your mouth is sticky. Best to make sure.

When you can muster the strength to force yourself to your feet- using your psionics isn’t even an option when you’re like this- you pad silently to the nutrition block, still sluggish-slow, dragging your feet slightly, staring at the floor. Your hands trail across the doorframe, and for a moment you’re distracted by something, you can’t identify what, and just hold onto it. You stare at nothing. You can’t think. You try to remember what it was- right, food. Water. You're so out of it it's not even funny.

Inside, you hate it, days like this, and you wonder where the medicine went wrong, because a little thread of memory reminds you that this sort of thing is bullshit and normal people don’t get up in the middle of perfectly good, restful sleep for no reason at all, much less wake up with their thoughts moving like molasses. You're not sure what you hate more, your thoughts overclocking or your thoughts lagging like this.

You shake your head once the moment passes and slink to the thermal hull. Stale bread. Water. Bits of leftover pizza. You’ll take it anyway, because there’s nothing else, because you suck at keeping yourself fed. You don’t even bother heating it up, just reach in for something you can rip with your hands and cram it into your mouth. It makes your spit even stickier and you can hardly taste it, but you chew, swallow, find a drink. Gulp it down, you command your throat, and you do, so at least that’s still working.

You turn around and can’t bring yourself to walk back to the cupe for some other arbitrary reason, and your insides seethe. You close the door of the thermal hull and slide down, back against the cool metal, until your ass is on the floor and your head is on your knees. You aren’t tired, not really, but you’re not firing on all cylinders either. Something still isn’t right, and you muzzily sit there, naked, slimy, wondering what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

The minute, like the moment, finally passes, and you achingly-not-achingly get up, suddenly aware of every push and pull of muscle, tendon, bone. You stare at your hands and flex your fingers. You walk, step by step by step by step.

There’s nothing else to do except go back to sleep, and you can’t do that. You wipe yourself off as much as you can and hunt down your husktop instead. Maybe you can get some work done, right? Except when you open it up, open up your files, you end up staring blankly as if you can’t parse a single line of code through your head, and you can’t continue where you left off either.

The buzzing continues in your brain, tingling like a million little marchbug-light footsteps. You ignore it, but it doesn’t help you focus any.

You check Trollian. Everyone is offline, of course everyone is offline at this hour, except those people you added a long time ago and never bother talking to anymore and the oddities that never seem to be offline at all.

You consider speaking to one of them.

You snort, and decide against it. Talking to a near stranger, talking to anyone right now, even online, feels hundreds of sweeps beyond your grasp.

Time passes.

Still breathing. Already ate. Already drank. No one’s online. Can’t sleep. Can’t code. Can’t think.

“Fuck.” You mutter to yourself. Your mouth feels strange around the word, slow, lips cracked, your teeth in the way of your tongue. “Shit.” You say instead, and it sounds even worse. You still aren’t sure what’s wrong, and again you look at your hands, pale in the light of the screen, poised over the keys. You hold them up to the light, looking at their silhouette, and it doesn’t feel like they’re yours, even though logically you know they are, and you can make them move if you think about it the right way.

You end up watching videos until the moon creeps over the horizon, and guzzle coffee like you’re dying when you remember you have shit to do today, in just a few hours. People will be waking up- your world will be waking up- and you open the window and watch the moons rise, and you think, tonight is going to suck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags will be added, please comment if you noticed anything I missed.  
> Sollux's issues are based on my personal understanding of my own issues, but as I'm not a psychiatrist, please take these accounts as personal experience.


	2. Scatterbrain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Racing thoughts and something I don't know the name of when you just can't focus this time.

Your mouth feels like lightning. It crawls across your tongue and the back of your throat, spreads through your jaw until you’re gritting your teeth without realizing. When you do realize, you stop, but it’s not long before your hands are clenched and your fangs are bared like you want to fight, again. Thing is, there’s nothing there for fighting.

You at least remember what you were doing, but remembering comes in flashes, one on the heels of the other, stumbling into each scene and flicker until you can’t see jack shit. You hiss through your teeth and plant your fingers on the keys, lightly, willing yourself to tap out letter after symbol after letter, but whatever will you have isn’t enough to get through the haze.

It’s miserable is what it is. One minute, you’re on top of the world, your fingers flying across the keys so fast they’re a blur and the lines of text appearing on the screen as fast as you can think them into existence. Then the next, you’re running too fast, a loose collection of bits and pieces held tenuously together in vaguely trollish shape, and there isn’t enough duct tape in the world to make you feel like you won’t fall apart. Pressure leaks from the cracks in your cranium, expanding outwards from a central point in your brain, storm whirling in the bone.

You clutch your head. The static resolves itself into real static, popping between your horns and making your jaws chatter. You grit your teeth again and grip your horns so hard it feels like you might rip them right out of your skull, but it the usual grounding that comes with letting out electricity won’t come now.

Frustrated, you push away from your husktop and focus on breathing. Your leg jitters, up and down, and your teeth are still clenched so hard that your jaw muscles ache. You focus on relaxing yourself, muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon, from the toes up. It’s something you’ve done hundreds of times, and like those hundreds of times, when your body is loose-limbed and you’re staring at the ceiling, you feel your mind floating apart. You may as well be seafoam.

You still have so much to do, but now the thoughts are whirling you to pieces from the inside, and you’ve fallen back too far to do anything about it but ride it out. Unlike when your mind is slowed down to a crawl, time seems to have sped up and slowed down all at once. Everything’s moving too fast, leaving you behind.

A ping from your husktop tugs you out of your reverie somewhat. You frown. You really don’t want to talk to anyone right now, and yet, you don’t want to be alone with your racing thoughts either.

In the end, you at least read the message. It’s your moirail, she’s checking to see if you’re online, which at least gets a humourless chuckle out of you because you’re practically always online, you practically _live_ online. But you don’t answer her, because you can hardly muster the words in your head amid the maelstrom, let alone get them into your hands and onto the screen.

This is the second week you’ve been MIA on Trollian, for a variety of reasons. At first you thought you needed a break from all the people trying to talk to you about their problems, because you seem to be the go-to guy when something breaks. Now you’re just avoiding everyone because you don’t even know what you’re thinking yourself, you don’t know what you’d say if you did have to talk to anyone.

You suppose that really, really means you need to talk to your moirail. If anyone can get your head back on your shoulders with a few choice words, it’s her. But you don’t even know how to broach the subject. “Something’s wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.” Yeah, that’d work, wouldn’t it?

Of course not. Your moirail talks to the dead, but she isn’t a mind reader. Even if she was, how would she understand what’s going on in there, when _you’re_ in your own head 24/7 and you have no fucking idea?

You find your hands hovering over the keys, and then you sigh and place them at your sides. You rub at your eyes, focus on the feeling of your knuckles pressing the jellylike tissue into your head. Your moirail can’t help you with this. Hell, you can’t help you with this, and her responsibility in this relationship isn’t to pick you up every time you forget where your feet are.

The longer you wait, however, the more you feel like you’re coming apart. Your thoughts feel further and further away, like watching a train pass by (and crash into another train, just outside of view). The feeling of static hasn’t left; if anything, it’s worsened since you stopped your little relaxation exercise. There’s a roaring in your ears that wasn’t there earlier and definitely isn’t the voices of the damned, more like the blood in your head is racing like your mind is, except your pusherbeat hasn’t changed at all.

You go over what you could say to Aradia again. Your thoughts keep looping, chewing on the same phrases over and over- snips of memory again, but louder and faster, and at the same time fucking incomprehensible. At least when you’re mind’s slowed down, you can sort of understand, sort of focus, even if you don’t feel the motivation to do anything. Like this you’re full of energy, but there’s nowhere for it to go.

You at least contemplate setting your Trollian handle to yellow, so she can see you’re online. You ponder, or try to ponder, what you could possibly explain your problem as. “Hey AA, I haven’t been around because I literally either can’t get out of the ‘cupe, or can’t figure out what the hell I want to do with my time, let alone figure out what I want to say to you after a two week radio silence.”

Her handle goes grey, just like that, and you’ve missed your chance to speak with her.

Fuck.


	3. Showers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The saddest masturbation scene I've ever written. Not that I've written many.

You sleep of course, but they’re grudgingly bitten-out chunks of sleep from an otherwise unbroken daze of awake; if they aren’t that, they’re snatches of daymares and tossing and turning in the slime, before waking fully, itching all over, as if covered in marchbugs. It’s one of the worst days of sleep you’ve ever had, continuously, for a week.

You look yourself in the mirror and find a gaunt, puffy-eyed face staring back at you. Gaunter than usual anyway, with the skin sagging around thin lips and eyes gone murky orange and greenish around the edges; bloodshot in other words.

You sigh and look around the squalid mess of your hive. There’s gamegrubs and old clothes lying everywhere, wrappers of the instant food you haven’t even bothered finishing (the dishes are a daymare to look at, worse to smell, and some of the stuff in the thermal hull is rotting). You acknowledge, as you have a hundred times before, that you have a problem.

You slump against the wall and slide down sitting, staring into space and trying to think through the morass, tick off things you need to do to survive this: Eat, sleep (nearly impossible), talk to someone, clean up the hive. You sniff yourself and add take a bath to the list. There’s no order to it. You can’t muster the fucks to give the list any sort of order.

You drag yourself by the nails to the ablutions block, clamber into the ablutions stand still in your clothes, and turn on the hot water. It feels almost good, soaking through your clothes, as if someone is in there with you, clinging to you, and oh fuck you can’t believe yourself. You look down in disgust and find that the heat and touch is turning you on, because you’re weird like that.

Or, maybe, it’s been a while since someone’s touched you. You couldn’t really muster the fucks to give literally either. You think back and realize you haven’t even touched yourself in a while, which is a weird realization because when you’re on top of things you do it pretty regularly.

Like this, you run your hands curiously over yourself. It’s slick and odd under the hot water (almost burning, burning the filth away you think), and it feels like a stranger’s hands pressing against your chest and sides and legs through the sodden fabric of your clothes. Slowly, you run your hand down your abdomen and the other up your thigh, until they converge between your legs. Your socks are soggy, like tongues on your toes, and you curl them and feel the fabric squish.

Again, you think of how gross you are, getting turned on by a simple shower, but fuck it, you’ll allow yourself your strange little pleasures. You can’t actually feel more than a banked, slight arousal at the moment, even with how nice it feels to have the water run down your back and through your hair, so you give yourself a little squeeze and start to rub.

Still nothing. You must be really out of it. It’s actually a little frustrating, but at least now you’re motivated by something- now you want the little high that comes with orgasm, small as it is. You tilt your head back and moan, though it feels halfhearted, but maybe moaning will get you further into it because normally you’re all quiet breaths and clenched teeth. It’s rote by now, with how often and how proficient you’ve gotten at it, and yet, and still. You bring up images that should titillate you without fail, and they get more and more extreme until you’re pushing your boundaries a little, and yet you can’t seem to find one to latch onto and set yourself off.

“For fuck’s sake.” You grumble, frustrated, plateaued. Water leaks into your mouth and you let it dribble down your chin while you fumble with your jeans and push them halfway down your hips. You look down at yourself and your freakish double bulges, twisting weakly against your thigh from the wet warmth of your underwear.

You suppose it’s just as well. You weren’t thinking. You were hoping you’d stain your pants, haha, silly you, you sick fuck, especially with how hard it is to get genetic material stains out of cloth, even if the hot water would have mostly washed it away. But you stop thinking about laundry determinedly, tilt your head against the warming tiles again and stroke your bulges. Your other hand teases the lips of your nook. You spread your legs wider to accommodate your hands.

You pretend, as hard as you can, that the soaked cloth on your skin is hands and tongues and hair, even if it feels nothing like such. You think of lips sucking at every inch of you while you steadily pump your bulges, and then think of them biting down. You think of it happening to other people, a variety of different combinations running through your mind, and still. You can’t. Come.

You aren’t even close. You let go of yourself in disgust and peel off your sodden shirt partway, just get the hem over your head without bothering with the sleeves and stop teasing your bulges to play with your grubscars, the little piercings there. The tile feels cold against your bare skin, and now you’re naked and have a pile of wet jeans tangled around your ankles. This was an awful idea. You’re committed to it anyway.

At least your irritation is a good enough simulacrum of pitch that your bulges are swelling properly, even without your touch. They wrap around your wrist and oh, that feels a little better, you plunge your fingers into your nook and rub hard. You hiss at the pain, but you keep at it anyway, until you’re shaking under the spray, until your wrist is starting to cramp a little but you don’t dare slow down.

“Come on, come on…” You mutter, and at last bite the inside of your cheek as, weakly, but at last, you come. There isn’t even very much slurry out of you for it. If this were a viable slurry contribution, you would have been culled on the spot for inadequacy.

You don’t care. You at least managed a weak little afterglow that leaves you loose-limbed and semi-content on the ablutions stall floor. It’s a contentment that washes away with your slurry soon enough though. You sob and you don’t know why.

You spend an unknowable amount of time in there, shaking with your tears and frustration and hatred, all directed inwards, and strip your soggy clothes off and throw them in the sink. You soap yourself until your skin aches, then wash your greasy hair, scrub your horns, even clip your claws. When you’re clean, you get out and dry off, and you even use one of the good, fluffy towels Aradia gifted you once.

Your clothes don’t stay in the sink. When you’re passably dry, you go around the hive buck-ass nude and clean up the laundry (or at least throw it all in the laundry basket). You’ll bother actually washing it later. For now, you want to sleep and sleep and sleep. This time you succeed for an hour, and then you get a call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Already writing chapter four, and still working on chapter 5 of Cascade.


	4. Phonecalls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some stuff about moirails.

Now you’re just kind of pissed. The generic, heavy sadness from earlier gives way to groggy irritation as you open your eyes in the slime and slide out to follow the irritating sound of the palmtop ringing through your skull. When you remember that you could just use your psionics to pick it up without getting out of the ‘cupe, you’re already out of it anyway.

You grumble as you pick it up. Your lisp is sopor slurred and even worse to your own ears for it. Your exasperation burns through your tone. “Captor residence, who is it?”

 _“It’s me, Sollux. What’s wrong?”_ It’s Me turns out to be Aradia, and you immediately feel like an asshole for not even bothering to check caller ID, but it’s too late now, she knows something’s up, you can’t say I’m Fine at this point.

“You woke me up.” You lie. You can practically hear her pursing her lips.

 _That’s not all.”_ Not even a question, she knows you too well. You lean your head against the recuperacoon’s side and sigh deeply, closing your eyes, still holding the palmhusk to your ear. _“What’s wrong, Sollux?”_

“I don’t know.” You say at last, and you sigh, slogging through the words. “I guess it’s that sort of thing again. I can’t sleep, I barely eat and, bit gross here, I just jacked off an hour ago and it took a lot more effort than jacking off ever should. I just… guess I’m not feeling well.”

Single cluck of her tongue, you know she’s probably checking the time. _“How many nights has it been since you went out?”_

“A week.” You answer automatically. You're sure enough, give or take.

You hear her hum; light, curious even, like she’s holding your issues up to the light and examining them like a weird bone. _“Should I call Karkat?”_

You hesitate and weigh that. On the one hand, you’re a hot mess right now, and you could seriously use a kick in the globes to get you going again, get you out of this emotional morass that’s been the glacial entirety of your season, culminating in this week. Karkat is perfect for that, whether you two are red or black or whatever is between it that usually comes with him; but on the other hand, you still feel fragile. Breakable. Floaty and whatever. It’s not a nice feeling or one you’re used to, will ever be used to, despite how many times you hit this low, and you don’t know if Karkat’s tough-love-soft-hate is all you need.

 _“Sollux?”_ She prompts, trying to get you to focus again. You blink.

“Yeah, that’d be good.” You say. You hear her almost put down the palmhusk and add, “if you could come too, that’d be great.”

It’s as close as you’ll ever get to begging. She knows you well enough to pause and you can almost feel her stroking her fingers through your hair and over the bases of your horns. _“Heh, yeah. I’ll come over, then. I’m so incredibly cotton-candy pale for you, you quadrant-smearing little deviant.”_ God bless Aradia Megido. She hangs up and you’re alone with your thoughts again. You have absolutely no idea how you’re going to handle the both of them at once, and you’re not sure if that’s because your thoughts are still slowly spinning out of control.

Sleep is now a distant fantasy, so you towel down, force yourself to at least put on clean underwear and load laundry in the apparel cycler. It’s downright hypnotic, watching your clothes turn round and round in there. Aradia and Karkat find you like that, once Karkat kicks down the door that you forgot to unlock, loud enough to make you jump.

Aradia carefully replaces the busted up lock with immaculate application of her psionics that you’ll never be able to replicate, and Karkat kneels beside your sorry, curled up, half-naked form, and you have to give him credit because this time he doesn’t shock himself by prodding you. You crack open an eye to glare up at him for breaking the door, sclera-iris-pupil rapidly oscillating between red and blue, but then you chirp at him.

“Not in front of your moirail, you sick freak.” He grunts, which is about as close to a normal indoor voice as Karkat Vantas is ever capable of. Said moirail finally finishes fixing your door and kneels on the other side of you, pulling you off the floor in surprisingly strong, soft arms just a slight bit less warm than Karkat’s fever heat. Aradia doesn’t even care that her hair is frizzing up from all the static you’re giving off, the charge bouncing around the cloud of blackness around her horns.

She hums, and your chirp turns into a soft, happy purr, or at least as much of a purr as you can manage in your current state. It comes out warbly and strange, but you at least let them know that you’re happy to see them, that you’re tethered a little more closely to reality when she’s holding you. Karkat thumbs at one of your horns in a gesture so blatantly pale that it makes your entire face go bruisy-gold. Hypocrite.

“You’re a mess, Captor.” Karkat says, voice raspy-low now that he isn’t yelling. You giggle dumbly at that and tilt your head back, and he looks like he wants to smack you for such an equally pale gesture, and right in front of your moirail at that; Aradia pouts down at you and squishes you a little harder in her arms, and does her curious little hum again.

“So, what do we do with you tonight?” She asks. She always asks, because it’s different every time, and this time you’re not sure enough of how you feel except that you feel like you’re floating away, dissolving at the joints and seams. You manage to tell her three words.

“Tie me down.”

And the two of them look at each other and understand. Karkat rolls his eyes and peels off his sweater.


	5. Mending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Step one in the care of your nerd.

Aradia’s fingers are warm and soothing as she rubs your temples, her palms cupping your face as she murmurs in your ear like she was leading you over a tightrope. It certainly  _ feels _ like you’re high up and steadily climbing higher, the dizzying feeling of being where your psionics won’t help you, even as she keeps rubbing your cheeks and Karkat starts tying your arms behind you with his sweater. 

The unyielding cloth is good, though. He ties like an expert after having done this so many times before; he doesn’t cut off the circulation in your hands, just keeps you in place and helps ground you in the feeling of cotton against your skin. You test the bonds to make sure, and Aradia keeps shushing you all the while as Karkat starts rubbing into your shoulders.

“Eyes on me.” She says, and your eyes are immediately drawn to the raspberry-dark red of her lips. They curve up in a smile that shows her teeth. You would feel trapped if anyone else ever smiled at you like that but from her it just sends a warm tingle along your scalp; your horns buzz until you feel Karkat’s calloused fingers take hold of one’s base, rubbing over the cuticle in a way that just makes you melt.

“We’re going to blindfold you, okay?” Aradia holds out the strip of black cloth she always uses for this, and you nod. She ties it around your head and the world goes muffled and dark, and all you can go off of are their voices and the touches along your bare skin.

“Good so far?” She asks, right up next to your ear. You nod, practiced, feel yourself sliding further into the controlled little headspace they’ve built for you through these games. “Can you stand?” She asks next, and you lick your lips before you nod again, slower this time, the way they know means you need help.

Two pairs of strong arms, one hard with muscle and the other soft with pudge, familiar and safe and achingly tender, wrap around you and help you to your feet. You feel someone loop coarse leather- Aradia’s whip- in a ring around your neck, a makeshift leash, and there are still hands on your hips; Karkat’s, you’re sure, with the squared shapes of the fingers, the way they tremble like Aradia’s never do.

“We’re going to take you to the seating platform.” Aradia’s voice is in front of you, and you feel a slight tug on the leash, a slight nudge from the hands on your hips. “Just listen to my voice and follow the leash. You’re being so good for us.” You can hear her smiling.

They guide you forward, one foot in front of the other, Aradia murmuring encouragements as you go. You hang onto every word, “Come on, we’re moving in a straight line. I’m keeping the way clear. Trust me; trust  _ us _ .” It’s always a little bit of a wonder to you how quiet Karkat is during these sessions, but you suppose it makes sense; and besides, you’re not complaining when you hear his raspy voice in your ear, like he’s not sure how to make it sound gentle but he’s trying so hard, for you, all for you. 

“We’re here, you can sit down.” And you do, and he lets you go, only to put his hands on your shoulders while Aradia turns the leash around on your neck. You can feel the knot on the side of your throat, heavy on your shoulder now, while they reposition you so you’re sort of lying across someone’s lap. (Aradia’s lap, the cloth is too soft for Karkat’s jeans.)

“How are you holding up?” Aradia runs her fingers through your hair. Your bloodpusher has slowed down considerably and you’re purring, but you appreciate her asking all the same.

“Keep going.” You murmur. You can find the note of it now, sharper, less slurred. It sounds like you, which it hasn’t sounded like in over two weeks, and the purring thrums through your thoracic struts. You can hear them purring too, Karkat’s deep under his ribs and Aradia’s almost leapingbug-like. She tightens the noose of her whip around your neck until you can feel the lump of the knot pressing int. Karkat nuzzles the back of your neck and Aradia kisses over your covered eyelids.

“Alright, Captor, breathe.” Says Karkat’s voice. He pulls on the leash’s loop and you’re pulled up by your neck, pulled away from Aradia’s lap and you whine embarrassingly as you’re pulled away from her warmth only for her to wrap her arms around your shoulders and press soft kisses along your cheekbones. Karkat winds the remainder of the whip around you, trapping you between them both even more. You faux-struggle to move and you can’t, but he still has to make sure. “Breathe. Just focus on us, we’re right here.”

Aradia’s hair is a curtain across your shoulders, woolly-warm and ticklish. Her breath is soft and wet against your ear, her hand on your belly is a spot of warmth you want to curl around. “Tell us if anything goes wrong, you can do it.” You shiver and she rubs higher, at the dip between your ribs and your gut, higher until you know she can feel the faint beat of your bloodpusher through your skinny chest.

Karkat’s purring sounds like a growl as he massages circles into the crook between your neck and shoulder. “I need you to breathe with me. In through your nose and out through your mouth.” You do so as you feel his breath trail down your arm, and you’re surprised when as you start breathing out, sharp, sudden pain sparks on one of your grubscars. You mewl, and he’s off immediately.

“Sollux?” He breathes against your skin. Your pulse has picked up again; it grounds you, you don’t feel so much like you’re floating away anymore, but you don’t want pain right now, you don’t think you can handle pain right now.

“Red.” You say, and he murmurs sorry, presses his lips over the stinging crescent where he bit you, licks it slowly. His tongue is slightly rough but wet and soft, slick and careful. It’s hotter than his hands, makes your skin tingle where it touches you as he does it again. Aradia gathers your face in her hands and lightly nibbles the curve of your ear with her lips. She squeezes the base of one of your horns, narrows your focus down to the slow, slow circles her fingers wind against the sensory hairs and the soft tissue where it meets your scalp. 

“Yellow.” You shiver, still unsure but relaxing again, as Karkat nuzzles against your hip, wraps his arms around your waist while Aradia keeps playing with your horns, and then both of them squeeze your horns at the same time; not too hard, but enough to make it a little harder to breathe. Aradia kisses you while you try to breathe and you groan into her mouth, all in a rush at once. 

“G-green,” You sigh into her.

“You’re doing great, Sollux.” She whispers into your mouth, breathing with you; in when you exhale and out when you inhale so you’re full of warm air that tastes of her. You still feel loose-limbed and disjointed, but you feel a little more whole with them around you like this. It’s enough to almost make you cry, and they aren’t even halfway done. You know how this goes. You swipe your tongue against her mouth and she giggles.

“Alright, we’ll get to it.” She says, petting your hair. It makes you aware that it’s still wet and greasy and gross, but she’s there for you anyway, and so is Karkat, and it helps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that it took me literal years to post this lmao I have no idea when I'll post the ending.


End file.
